[venkyk]

developed in java and running for decades? how long has the language been around?

[jacquesm]

19 years. But sun was pushing it quite aggressively at enterprises so it is not rare to see big java installations that are now 15+ years old.

And those are not the most fun to work on.

[arethuza]

I started using Java in early '95 (having begged a copy from someone at Sun) and I seemed to be one of the first people writing stuff outside of Sun.

[jebblue]

I started in August 1995 when I first heard about it, which I thought was when they released it but it may have had a variety of trickle releases.

[arethuza]

I was working on something slightly similar (embedding a VM into a browser) during '94/'95 and was a bit miffed when I first heard of Java....

However, I did think Java was rather good and when I co-founded a start-up in mid '95 we positioned ourselves as a "Java company" - which was no bad thing in the long term as we were in a reasonable position when Netscape, Novell and IBM later decided they wanted to support it. Indeed our 2 round of VC investment was led by Novell - quite unusual for a UK company at the time...

[sgt101]

I was doing Java in a very mainstream UK company in 1998; but we were leading edge and it became "standard" in 2000ish. By 2003 there were 100's of developers using it where I worked.